April Acevedo, a DePaul University senior studying film and television with a concentration in cinematography, stood in front of a room of people in the theater in the basement of the Maggie Daley building of DePaul’s Loop campus. Acevedo welcomed the audience to the event, telling them they were in for a wonderful night of film. A night where everyone would be able to themselves on screen. That night, there would be screenings of seventeen short films that featured and were created by DePaul students with marginalized identities.
It was a night for people who had long lived life without a mirror in the media to finally look at screen and see themselves staring back. The theater was packed with an audience as diverse as the films that were being shown. People had come out in droves to see themselves.
This was the first annual Inclusion in the Industry Showcase. Inclusion in the Industry is a new organization at DePaul that focuses on bringing communities that have been historically left out both in front of and behind the camera to the forefront.
The mission of the organization is about what Acevedo calls “presentation versus re-presentation.”
“Presentation has a stronger sense of immediacy because the story is coming from creditably identities that are able to speak about those identities,” said Acevedo.
Acevedo’s idea of presentation versus re-presentation has been clear in several recent big production company films. The recent animated film, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” used Black animators. This meant that when designing the film’s main character, an Afro-Latino boy named Miles Morales, his hair was designed accurately to represent what Black folks’ hair and curls patterns look like.
The importance of these small details cannot be diminished. For people who have not been able to see themselves reflected in film, this means everything. Presentations feel more salient for the people whose identities match with the ones on screen when the presentation is coming from inside the group. This has been seen in other recent large production films such as “Black Panther,” “Coco” and “Crazy Rich Asians.”
Acevedo’s own favorite example of presentation in film was “Moonlight.” Acevedo, as a queer, person of color who is also a Miami native, the narrative that “Moonlight” presented was something that Acevedo felt heavily connected with. This was the beginnings of the Inclusion in the Industry showcase.
“We feel providing an annual showcase where students are able to present the projects they have been working on so hard will allow use to see more of that presentation, re-presentation, and images that are authentic and honest and raw,” said Acevedo.
In the dark theater, a film about the red thread of fate, a Chinese myth that says people are connected to their soulmates by an invisible red thread, screened at the showcase. On the screen two women were wrapped and tangled in red thread. Connected to one another. As the narrative unravels, the red thread connecting the characters did the same. By the end of the film it became clear that the red threads of the two characters were never connected at all.
The other films featured that night had presentations of people of color narratives, disabled narratives and queer narratives. All of these were being told from the point of view of those who held these identities.
Acevedo’s own film was a short documentary about intersex, non-binary activist Pidgeon Pagonis and their work around forced surgery on intersex people.
Something wonderful happens when people are able to see themselves presented to the world in film produced by people who hold similar identities to their own. People finally have an opportunity to be seen not from the lens of someone from who views them as other, but from the lens of someone who seems them as a mirror.
The people at the showcase that night was given that. During the Q-and-A session following the screens, each filmmaker touched on how they had felt like they did not see themselves in the media they were consuming and how desperately they wanted that. People were able to create mirrors of themselves.
The connection the audience was able to feel with the films that night came from a place of feeling understood. From feeling seen. From being presented. From finally being included as the norm. And that connection needs to be felt more often for these communities.